The gods of France are treating me well. My new home has to be seen to be believed. On a narrow, golden street climbing to foothills, girded about by an old stone wall, it fills the top part of a 400-year-old house and has rooms big enough to swing cat families.
Elegantly refurbished, it has light and tiled floors, vintage fireplaces, high ceilings, beams, long windows, a couple of showers and, just for the hell of it, a couple of mezzanines too. The entrance, through an iron gate in a stone arch, leads to a wraparound terrace dappled by overhanging plane trees.
Everyone welcomed me. This even though my French was not half as good as I’d hoped; not half so bad either after a glass or two of red. I made a first, committed purchase at a market; a Moroccan wool rug, bright and decent sized for €30. Petit à petit l’oiseau fait son nid, as they say here.
Renting in France is not easy but criteria protect the tenant, contracts are taken seriously and there is respect on both sides. Some 45 per cent of people live in rented accommodation – though I doubt many have propriétaires as thoughtfully helpful as mine. Chloe and Martin were, and are, the beau ideal of landlords. They fed and watered me, helped with endless practicalities, made introductions, ensured a soft landing, became friends.
The windy, wet and often chilly weather in May and June was a surprise. Occasional shimmering days gave hope but were not what the southern French expect from their summer. They groaned at the griseille (greyness), swore there hadn’t been a summer like it since the 1950s, said the hand of God and global warming were stealing summer’s joy.
Evidence didn’t support this last. A friend, explaining that “l’été est sacré pour les Français’’, did not exaggerate. Summer in the midi is filled with music, dance and festivals, with circuses, exhibitions, theatre, sport and, wherever two or more people are gathered, food and wine.
La Transhumance ensures that sheep get a look in too. This, a great, biblical march to summer grazing, saw 800 sheep pass through the village. They had already travelled a distance when they arrived and, with a night’s rest and grazing ahead, poured skittishly through the narrow, main street. The aperitif given to everyone by the mayor and shared with the bergers had its biblical moments too. By 6am next morning sheep and bergers were gone, a long, long road ahead.
Then there was the French version of bull-fighting, a game of chicken in which a small bull, or a vachette, charges teen boys in a make-shift bullring. The boys, encouraged by testosterone and a roaring crowd, mostly make it to the railings and safety. The trouble with games of daring and chicken is that accidents happen; two injured boys were taken to hospital.
Bureaucracy
All has not been glitter in this, my first summer of the rest of my life in the French Midi. It has seemed, at times, that I may spend a great deal of the time left to me battling French bureaucracy – not that the Irish Social Welfare system was in any way speedy when called on to send a letter. The entire experience took years off the years left before I decided, along with everyone else in this gilded world, to go with the flow. The Midi way is to be relaxed and I’m going for it. Once I get sorted.
The canicule was another adjustment call, a broiling boiler of a heatwave with temperatures a languid 26 degrees at 6am and an even more languid 41 at midday. The air was weighted with heat, sun relentless, nights tyrannical and the highest ever temperature in France (45.9 degrees) recorded just down the road.
Schools closed for the worst of it and the elderly (moi? jamais) were kept an eye on. Vines burned to death, a sad and bitter sight given the loving encouragement they’d enjoyed for months before. Leaves fell in shrivelled piles from the plane trees shading my terrace. Five people died nationwide: four from drowning and one from heat stroke. There may be more to come.
My goods and chattels arrived on a sunny, pre-canicule day. Tony manouvered his great white van to within centimentres of my entrance and took less than three hours to unload the good, bad and sometimes downright ugly furniture that had crowded my Dublin home. Nothing was broken, cracked, even bruised. “Of course not,” said Tony, a man with a zen-like take on life. His helpmate Luc, a lanky, obliging young man from the Pic St Loup, was learning English on the job. His vocabulary tended toward the specialised.
A dread that my belongings would be a sad sight in their new surroundings wasn’t realised: they settled as if home to roost. Even the cushions, all 600 of them, found corners for themselves. A dread too that Chloe and Martin would be pained by the invasion of their fine-tuned, clean-lined aesthetic didn’t materialise when they arrived to help and took pleasure in the rooms’ new life.
And by the way, recent news in the local Midi Libre about the banning of trottinettes electriques from footpaths in Montpelier felt familiar. Lights, speed limits of 25km/h, helmets, vests and insurance are all to become obligatory. Great minds in Dublin could think about this. Just sayin’.
And so my life here goes on. Lots to learn, lots to relinquish, no regrets.
A couple of weeks ago I was singing the praises of Dublin when someone asked, with only mild irritation, why I’d left. Why indeed. Because of an itch and the times that are in it. Because life is onward going and adventure called. Because it was time to leave home.
